Seminar News

Summer Hart: One might think of the “man-eater” trope as an inversion of the analogy of women as prey/meat. Is it? When viewed through an ecofeminist lens, what functions do these archetypes serve in reinforcing or challenging patriarchal power structures?

Naama Harel: Predator-prey dynamics have been widely used as a model for describing sexual relations between men and women, whereby women are equated with prey animals, and men are presented as their predators. Ecofemists, like Carol Adams in her seminal study The Sexual Politics of Meat, critically analyze the linkage between the sexual objectification of women and the objectification of animals for consumption. According to this androcentric parallel—which is deeply entrenched in Western culture and embodied in numerous cultural representations—women are reduced to a piece of meat. Having sex with them—regardless of their consent—is equivalent to the virile act of meat-eating. The trope of the man-eater is an inversion of the analogy of women to prey/meat, but it’s likewise misogynistic, as it also envisioned by men that animalize women.

SH: The cover of your book is Marc Chagall’s “The Bride and Groom on Cock.” Can you talk about the symbolism in this piece and why you chose it for your cover?

NH: Marc Chagall’s paintings of turn-of-the-century Eastern European Jewish towns, known as shtetls, famously offer a vision of Jewish life that is at once intimate, lyrical, and symbolically charged. Within this world, animals—such as cows, goats, and roosters—are not marginal details, but rather integral members of the communal fabric. They appear as agents alongside human figures, often gazing knowingly, collapsing the boundary between human and animal life. These beings evoke both the material realities of shtetl existence—agrarian labor, domestic proximity—and a deeper symbolic register, drawing on Hasidic storytelling and Jewish folk traditions in which animals participate in a shared moral and spiritual universe. The animals in “The Bride and Groom on Cock” provide companion presence, embodying continuity, vulnerability, and a kind of sacred immanence that binds the community together across species and across time. As soon as I saw this image I knew it would be the book cover, as it is a visual manifestation of the literary works examined in the book.

SH: You presented some of this writing at The University Seminar on Human-Animal Studies. How did this experience inform the shape of your book?

NH: Sharing my work in progress with colleagues in The University Seminar on Human-Animal Studies was particularly insightful. I typically present my work in Hebrew/Jewish literature conferences, where participants are often familiar with the literary works, but not with the prism of Human-Animal Studies that I use in the analysis of these works in this book. Here, it was the other way around; my colleagues in the seminar were not familiar with the literary corpus, but they were conversant with the theoretical perspective. This interdisciplinary discussion contributed to expanding the conceptual and methodological lenses through which I read literary texts, especially by foregrounding how species, embodiment, and power intersect across cultural and theoretical frameworks. Engaging with scholars of Human-Animal Studies from other departments and programs, such as religion, anthropology, and archeology, has also helped refine my reading practices, particularly in attending to how representations of animality structure human subjectivity in Hebrew modernist fiction and how gendered identities are co-constructed through these interspecies imaginaries. In this sense, interdisciplinary exchange does not simply supplement my research but actively reshapes its questions, enabling a more nuanced understanding of how literary texts participate in broader debates about the human–animal divide, feminist theory, and cultural modernity.

SH: What are you currently working on?

Currently, I am working on a new book that examines Hebrew and Yiddish literature depicting slaughtered animals and their slaughterers. Whereas in H. N. Bialik’s renowned 1903 poetic responses to the Kishinev pogrom (“On the Slaughter” and “In the City of Slaughter”) the slaughtered animals are a mere metaphor for the Jewish victims, many other literary works probe—ethically, religiously, emotionally, and politically—the question of animal slaughter against the background of antisemitic dehumanization of the Jews, as well as their persecution and social vulnerability. The first part of the manuscript explores the anti-slaughter stance, taken by marginalized protagonists: animals, victims of persecutions, and children. Its second part traces two antithetical tropes—ruthless and merciful—of ritual slaughterers, who are standing at the threshold of corporeality and spirituality.

Indigenous Botany: The Cruz-Badiano Codex in Dialogue

This event, conceived and organized by The University Seminars Director Susan Boynton and hosted by the Center for Science and Society, the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program, and the University Seminar on the History and Philosophy of Science, was held on April 7, 2026.

The Cruz-Badiano Codex, which transmits Nahua medicinal recipes translated into Latin, was compiled in 1552 by Indigenous scholars of the College of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, among them the physician Martín de la Cruz and the translator Juan Badiano. It is decorated with 184 vivid illustrations of curative plants that have inspired works by artist Blanka Amezkua.

The conversation included an introduction to the Codex by Nuria Galland, Director of the Museum of Mexican Medicine and Amezkua’s discussion of the Codex in relation to her works.